There are two important wheels to think of that is essential in many different types of business and also areas of business and that is efficiency and effectiveness. When we think about our work day or a department, we can see efficiency and effectiveness. When you improve one or both sides of these wheels can make a big difference.
Efficiency is one thing but effectiveness becomes another. If we think of a car or automobile, you will find that keeping the car still while pressing on the gas is a good idea of efficiency, but to move forward is to be effective.
Effectiveness is important and efficiency is important, but until there is movement, there is efficiency but no effectiveness.
Manufacturing shows us an important understanding of efficiency. Efficiency can be considered the manufacturing side and the operations side of the business. Achieving more efficiency is one thing and increasing efficiency, but effectiveness can be seen as the other end of the spectrum, how many is being sold.
The drive between effectiveness and efficiency is important.
Take your day, your work day and private life, we can have efficiency which is considered time, but we need to find efficiency to make that translate into work done.
Efficiency in and of itself leads to bottlenecks mostly, and it is here that there is room to scale.
However, when we come to the effectiveness scale, the process of effectiveness becomes an important factor in understanding growth in an organisation.
Effectiveness also with efficiency has an important place in other departments, marketing for example can make use of effectiveness and efficiency to be able to drive better results. Our efficiency then moves to becoming effective marketing campaigns.
Like marketing departments, going back to the manufacturing view of efficiency and effectiveness we find that there is plenty of room to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
If you want to improve efficiency, then it is important to become resourceful. Resourcefulness and understanding resources are an important aspect in reaching efficiency. A book for example not read does not reach to effectiveness but whether you have reached efficiency with that book. The practical knowledge then applied being your effectiveness at learning and implementing what you learn.
Both increases in efficiency and effectiveness have a big effect on our output. For example, if you go jogging or if you go running, running is more efficient. You are using more of that resourcefullness.
Some things though efficiency is dangerous, such as logging a forest. Efficiency can be really bad. Or even with raising cows, efficiency can be sought but can be really bad to follow efficiency.
A balanced view of efficiency is important. You can go on a run but you can’t run all the time.
It is good to have a good understanding of efficiency and effectiveness in departments and in your organisation and life. If you become efficient, you are making use of your resources. Getting to efficiency is important, at the same time being effective is important. Think if you manufacturered 1 million items and half was not made right, you would need to seek to be more effective to improve.
When you start to implement this, you will start to see your efficiency improvement as possible and being effective more of a promise.
